This Special Issue of the Review of African Political Economy appears a decade since a landmark double issue of the journal was published in 2002. In addressing the then apparent resolution of the second Congo war, ROAPE's editors stressed the difficulties of resolving the complex and interrelated problems linking the conflict to political and economic issues, the national and international context, and ‘issues of identity, ethnicity and nationality’ (Trefon et al. 2002). A decade on, the DRC is experiencing an absence of both outright war and a lasting peace. Periodic outbreaks of fighting, as with the M23 occupation of Goma and other parts of North Kivu in November 2012, have led to the deaths of soldiers and civilians and to the further displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. The DRC has made a limited recovery from the worst aspects of its recent conflicts, but few if any of the underlying problems have been resolved in the last decade and the complexity of doing so has not significantly diminished. In this context, this Special Issue focuses less than its predecessor on national and international political issues – although the Briefing by Theodore Trefon provides significant insight into this area. Instead, it seeks to show the ways in which some Congolese people, particularly in the east of the country, find strategies to survive, cope and in some cases even to profit from, the liminal socio-political environment in which they find themselves. This, we believe, provides a compelling sense of the political economy of ‘post-war’ DRC from the perspective of those who experience it first-hand.
The articles in this issue analyse the social transformations occasioned by more than 15 years of continuing political and social violence in the DRC. These conflicts do not have a singular logic, but result from multiple local conflicts, as well as outside interventions. The violence associated with the Congo wars has caused social upheavals throughout the country, but particularly in central and eastern regions. These wars occurred in a context of a collapsed state and of a society plagued by widespread poverty, which amplified their impact. Although many existing social arrangements have been thrown into total disarray, a perhaps surprising range of new social institutions and patterns have also arisen. The articles in the Special Issue explore some of the ways in which major institutions and patterns of Congolese society have been transformed by the wars, and how new models of political engagement, economic activity and social interaction continue to evolve. This editorial will provide a limited introduction to the historical and contemporary context for these articles, explaining the valuable contribution each makes to our understanding of the DRC in relation to this context.
War, poverty and state collapse in the DRC: a short history
A decade has gone by since the end of the devastating second Congo war. Whilst there has been no return to the horrific violence associated with Africa's ‘world war’, it is equally evident that no lasting peace has replaced it. Put simply, the DRC remains an extremely insecure place, prone to outbreaks of conflict and where civilians are periodically subject to personal threat, primarily because the supposed ‘settlement’ to the Congo wars did not resolve many of their underlying causes. Their historical origin can be traced to the nature of the postcolonial Congolese state and indeed in part to Congo's experience as a personal fiefdom of the Belgian King Leopold II (1885–1908) and then as a Belgian colony (1908–60). The central Congolese state that had effectively ceased to function by the mid 1990s has never been organically linked with the population. For much of its history, Congo has failed Weber's definition of a modern state, possessing a monopoly of armed force and of tax-raising powers. An important legacy of the colonial period was to forge a relationship of (violent) domination and (resentful) submission between state and society: the postcolonial state in Africa in general, and the DRC in particular, vividly bears the imprint of its colonial predecessor (Young 1994a). The achievement of national independence did not establish a political system that was in any meaningful way accountable to its population and attempts to achieve such accountability were resisted by many Congolese politicians and by some Western states.
Even when central authority was at its most effective, in the first decade of President Mobutu Sese Seko's rule (1965–75), this authority depended in large part on external support from the United States, which relied on Mobutu to secure the flow of strategic minerals and keep the communist threat at bay during the Cold War. Despite (or arguably because of) its extraordinary mineral wealth, extreme poverty has equally plagued the DRC since at least colonial times, and this was reinforced by the violent events immediately following Congo's independence in 1960. The ill-conceived and scarcely implemented development plans promoted by President Mobutu had little impact on the scope or depth of poverty in the country.
The more complete breakdown of formal relations between the state and its people that has gradually occurred from at least the 1970s has, as articles in this issue demonstrate, led to the development of a range of more informal and constantly evolving relationships between people and the state that are often, but not always, exploitative and predatory. Under Mobutu, the privatisation and ‘criminalisation’ of the post-independence state, known colloquially as ‘débrouillez-vous’ (‘help yourself’), was an injunction to get by without provisions from the state. Individual entrepreneurs were prompted to seek alternative means of survival. People engaged in various informal economies in response to a changing landscape of opportunities and constraints, creating severe conflicts over resources as an (unintentional) result, including land, citizenship and identity. As long as the central state was able to either mediate these conflicts, or suppress them through the use of force, they did not reach the level of armed struggle. Patronage was a key tool in the mediation of disputes in postcolonial Congo until 1990. But the economic crisis of the early 1990s removed financial support for local barons from the repertoire of tools that state officials could draw upon to damp down these conflicts.
The first half of the 1990s marked a further acceleration in the declining capacity of the Zairian state, providing the context for the start of the wars (Young 1994b, Clark 1998).1 The reach of the state into society and the ability of the authorities to capture their subjects' loyalties had gradually receded over the preceding two decades. Per capita income in Congo was only a fraction of its 1960 level by the time the slow-motion collapse of the Zairian state was reaching its culmination. Even against this grim background, however, the acceleration of state crisis and the rise of poverty since the early 1990s is notable. The export of copper and cobalt collapsed in this period because of low international mineral prices and the dysfunctionality of the nationalised mine company Gécamines. Mobutu responded by printing money, resulting in rampant inflation. Unpaid police and soldiers increasingly preyed upon the population. Meanwhile, the territory effectively governed by Mobutu shrank until his writ hardly extended outside Kinshasa. Once the ‘illusion of the integral state’ in Zaire was shattered (Young 1994b), conflicts between mobilised ethnic communities broke out in the peripheries of the Zairian state, specifically in Shaba (Katanga) (Berkeley 2001) and then in North Kivu. Indeed, Mobutu utilised such conflicts as a way of weakening his opponents, a classic strategy of divide-and-rule which strengthened existing and developed new ethnically based conflicts that would continue to deepen during and after the Congo wars (Berkeley 2001).
Whilst the end of the Cold War and the rise of a post-genocide Rwanda provided the anglophone West with a new regional ally, Mobutu's weakness presented opportunities to his internal opponents to draw on widespread popular discontent, expressed in the pro-democracy movement of the early 1990s. Yet the failure of opposition elites to unite or to mobilise the popular forces so evident in that movement meant that Mobutu was ultimately defeated not by his many internal opponents, but rather by a politico-military movement, the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération (AFDL), which was dependent on and partly directed by external powers, primarily Rwanda, Angola and other neighbouring states. Unresolved tensions between Mobutu's replacement as Congolese president, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, and his foreign backers, were the primary cause of the second Congo war (1998–2003), involving myriad Congolese militias and their foreign allies (Clark 2002, Prunier 2009, Reyntjens 2009).
Although it was crucial to bring this devastating war to an end, the nature of the Global and All-Inclusive Peace Agreement signed in South Africa in December 2002 not only failed to resolve the underlying causes of the conflict, but actually rewarded those who had sought power via military means. As the various foreign forces withdrew, the domestic insurgent groups with aspirations to rule over the whole Congolese territory entered into a mostly peaceful political competition beginning in 2003 and leading to elections in July 2006 (De Villiers 2009). The transitional ‘1 + 4 government’ gave a seat in government to each major armed actor whilst denying representation to civil society institutions that were arguably far more important representatives of popular will (the one significant exception to this rule is the Mai-Mai militia). The agreement, which prioritised a settlement amongst African states and their Congolese allies or proxies, neglected the internal political aspects of the conflict that, in some cases, preceded and in other cases were sparked by the two Congo wars. The deeply flawed disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) initiative brought some former militias into a bloated but dysfunctional Congolese army (see below), but did little to achieve an effective integration process or even ensure that former and serving soldiers were properly paid, fed and housed. Notwithstanding the peace settlement, regional powers, particularly Rwanda, continued to interfere in Congolese political life, with (until very recently) few if any sanctions applied by Western powers.
Accordingly, a range of militarised local conflicts has continued in Congo since 2006, a period that the international community has incorrectly characterised as ‘post-conflict’ (Autesserre 2010). The important complexities in each conflict have usually been glossed over in news reporting and even in scholarly analysis. In the Kivus, for instance, there is a cleavage between self-declared indigenous (‘autochthonous’) peoples and the Banyarwanda communities that have migrated into the area over a long period, a vital historical context that is often missed. Lars Huening's article in this Special Issue explains the historical origins of this division, demonstrating the interaction between competing claims to citizenship and identity, conflict over land and resources and access to the Congolese state, and how it continues to shape conflict between the Congolese armed forces and the M23 militia today. Similarly complex conflicts in northern Katanga and in the Ituri region continued to evolve in the supposedly ‘post-conflict’ environment, manifestations of both state failure and poverty (Turner 2007). With no legitimate source of public order, respect for the rule of law has collapsed in many spaces. Without sufficient income, the government has struggled to reassert its control over the areas that have become lawless and has itself frequently taken sides within such disputes, in the name of national defence against Congo's regional enemies. In an environment of both extreme economic scarcity and lawlessness, ‘Big Men’ have used violence for personal gain and barely tried to restrain the (often unfocused) anger of frustrated young men whom they nominally command.
The situation has naturally been most desperate in those parts of the country affected by war and other forms of social violence. The political turmoil in eastern DRC has created hundreds of thousands of temporary and long-term displacement of persons (Murison 2002), who are frequently in dispute with established residents over farmland, fuelling new conflicts that often have an ethnic dimension. It is in the east of the country, too, that the state has been slowest to reassert its authority following the departure of the foreign armies. To this day, various rebel groups roam through the ungoverned spaces of eastern Congo, often preying upon unprotected civilians. The Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) has proved to be another source of predation, rather than salvation, for the people of these long-suffering regions, to the extent that there is no often no qualitative difference between civilians' experience of so-called rebel forces and those of their own national army.
The disputed electoral victories of 2006 and 2011 have not brought to power a government with strong internal support. The political situation has certainly evolved, if not progressed: whilst the international community foisted the 2006 election process on a somewhat reluctant Congolese polity, during the 2011 poll it was President Joseph Kabila who utilised state resources to retain the presidency and mobilise electoral turnout in his areas of support. Nevertheless, as Theodore Trefon's briefing makes clear, Kabila remains marginalised from domestic political life and lacking in internal credibility as a national leader: he recognises that, like his predecessors as Congolese president, his position rests primarily on external rather than domestic support.
The acceleration of state failure in the 1990s exacerbated the other great burden of Congolese society, omnipresent and unrelenting poverty. According to the 2011 International Human Development Index statistics produced by the United Nations Development Programme, Congo's income was the second lowest in the world, ranking above only Liberia at 187th, but below the likes of Burundi, Liberia and Niger, countries all lacking Congo's vaunted natural resources. The overall level of human development for Congo was also second lowest in the world in 2010. The level of human development reached an all-time nadir in 2000, but had not rebounded to its 1990 level by 2010. In 2011, gross national income per person stood at an abysmal US$280 per year (PPP terms) and life expectancy at only 48.4 years, both figures far lower than they were at independence in 1960. Even in Kinshasa, largely spared the cruel ordeals of the wars, people barely survived, depending on an astounding variety of artifices and ingenious coping mechanisms (Trefon 2004).
The interaction of poverty, state collapse and war-related violence has created a complex of social dysfunction that has caused every aspect of social well-being to spiral downward. The poverty of the Congolese people causes them to remain disconnected from the state that rules them. Since most Congolese do not hold jobs in the formal sector, they cannot be directly taxed, and thereby provide income to the state (they are however irregularly ‘taxed’ by all manner of officials claiming to represent the state or other bodies of officialdom – see Laudati in this volume). The necessities of feeding oneself and one's family in a social context of disorder and obscene poverty leads young men, in particular, to search for sustenance and status though the linked modes of theft and militia participation. The growth of the illegal mining sector represented only one of many livelihood strategies people adopted to spread the adverse affects of household risk. As insecurity grew in the region and traditional agricultural production and trading patterns eroded, artisanal mining became one of the few remaining sources of livelihood options for the rural poor.
Challenging representations of war and violence
Given the complexity of this situation, one of the aims of this Special Issue is to challenge the ‘abusively simple’ (to paraphrase Prunier 2008) characterisation of the DRC in the international media. The country is frequently depicted as a vast ungoverned and ungovernable failed state, a state of chaos, an abyss, whose chronic state of violence and underdevelopment is a ‘long running tradition’. In such characterisations, Congo is literally and figuratively ‘cursed’ (Matti 2010), thereby removing responsibility from the outside world for its considerable role in shaping the circumstances that are presented in such narratives as internal and inherent, built into the country's DNA.
Articles in this issue provide a valuable rejoinder to such characterisations. Whilst eastern DRC generally, and the Kivus in particular, are a violent borderland (Boas 2010, p. 448), this is not an area devoid of governance. Nor are the oft-cited categories of ‘pillage’ and ‘plunder’ adequate for understanding either the genesis or the continuation of the region's violent conflicts, or the country's current socio-economic landscape. Rather, the state of the DRC today is the result of complex, multilayered and interlinking mechanisms and involves a multitude of different actors engaged in economic, social and political activities which require looking beyond the now tired and all too simplistic discourse of ‘creed, greed, and booty’ (Paddon 2010).
Two specific notions dominate Western representations of the crisis in the DRC: the explanation of conflict as based on the illegal export of valuable minerals (see below), and the horrific level of sexual violence and rape meted out by soldiers on the country's women. Whilst both narratives reflect all-too-real elements of the conflict and its effects, they are a thoroughly inadequate characterisation of a far more complex crisis that is fundamentally structural in nature.
The form of violence that has garnered the most international press attention in recent times has been sexual assault and mutilation at the hands of Congolese fighters, though widespread sexual violence in Congo has been well-documented for over a decade (see e.g. Human Rights Watch 2002). The vast extent of rape and sexual abuse is of course one of the most appalling aspects of the Congo wars and the collapse of the central state in the DRC. The impact of these assaults will reverberate for generations to come, affecting not just women and any children they bear, but also gendered and familial relations more generally. Other forms of predation and violence, however, have been no less prevalent during the Congo wars: theft of civilian property, arbitrary taxation, assault against men or women for many reasons, displacement from homes and land, and wanton destruction of property. This violence results both from well-reasoned strategies of war and the breakdown of social norms of control. In their article, Nicole D'Errico, Tshibangu Kalala, Louise Bashige Nzigire, Felicien Maisha and Luc Malemo Kalisya question the singular focus on victims of sexual violence, arguing that greater attention needs to be paid to the wider collapse of health and other services that, their Congolese respondents report, powerfully affect women who are vulnerable to rape. The tendency of international agencies to channel funds into programmes solely focused on rape victims neglects the real barriers to health care in the DRC. Most significantly perhaps, it is argued that international donors tend to ignore, and would do better to fund, the considerable grassroots initiatives against gender-based violence organised by Congolese women themselves.
Conflict in the DRC is undoubtedly linked to the extraction of natural resources and various other spoils, but this does not mean such resources were the primary cause of war. Rather, the opportunities presented by the exploitation of minerals led to an economisation of the conflict by trading in natural resources. Furthermore, the assumption that those involved in these economies are either greedy militia or profit-maximising businessmen overlooks the fact that the majority of those involved in the trade in precious minerals continue to be motivated by coping and survival. As Jackson (2002, p. 517) noted in ROAPE a decade ago, the current socio-political landscape that characterises the Congo is built ‘on older patterns of survivalist economics in Congo, it also represents a radical mutation of livelihood strategies responding to an economy profoundly destroyed by colonial and postcolonial neglect and greed, and more recently by … years of vicious war’. For a resource-poor farmer, then, the mining of coltan, the cutting of timber, or the growing of hemp, is part of the coping or survival economy; for the landowner leasing his land for the production of natural resources, it is part of the shadow economy; and, for militia and military that tax the trade in valuable resources, it is part of the war economy. Thus natural resources, whether gold, diamonds, timber, or ‘blood coltan’ (Mantz 2008) simultaneously represent a conflict good, an ‘illicit’ commodity and a means of survival, depending on the actors involved in its production/exploitation.
Mineral profits certainly provided a basis for some actors during the second Congo war, notably the Zimbabwean army's seizure of Katangese mines, tacitly endorsed by the regime of Laurent Kabila as the price of Zimbabwe's military support of his beleaguered regime. More broadly, mineral revenue was an important source of income for many armed forces both during the wars and subsequently. Meanwhile, despite the international boom in minerals since the mid 2000s, the DRC's vast mineral wealth has, as in previous periods of Congolese history, failed to translate into meaningful developmental gains (Hönke 2009). In this issue, Johanna Jansson analyses the controversial Sicomines agreement granting major mining rights to Chinese companies in exchange for huge Chinese development loans. Jansson helpfully challenges some of the most negative analyses of the agreement, criticism of which has been bound up with the wider hysterical denunciation of China's role in Africa. Whatever the origin of investor capital in large-scale mining, it remains clear that the Congolese state is unable to convert its considerable mineral wealth into effective developmental activities, to the benefit of its population.
However, as Laudati's article in this volume shows, minerals are only a small element of a much larger economy which remains in many respects predatory and informal – indeed, ‘informal’ is a misnomer for an economy in which the supposedly irregular is in fact the everyday norm. Of far greater relevance to most soldiers and civilians are non-mineral goods that form the everyday basis of trade. Through an examination of alternative forms of extraction (including roadblocks, the trade in forest resources, the looting of Congolese citizens, and the theft of cattle), she illustrates how such grassroots forms of extraction not only facilitate rebel military activities, but also provide the sole coping mechanism for large parts of the population. Such strategies of diversification, Laudati posits, in fact contribute to the reworking of social and economic arrangements for a more diverse network of actors beyond armed actors. The reality on the ground in the DRC is that vibrant, innovative economies and trading centres have grown in the absence of regulation and law enforcement. In this context, locally constituted codes of practice arise and create a degree of ‘order’ which may not rest on state authority or return revenues to the state, but which have allowed economies of value to continue in the midst of conflict. It is therefore important to understand the complexity, depth, and divergence of these parallel forms of extraction as they are likely to form the basis of economic arrangements in any truly post-conflict future.
Laudati also identifies the central role played in many economic transactions by the Congolese army, the FARDC. The army is notorious for its dysfunctionality: it has historically been highly ineffective as a military force, making up for its consistent failure to defend the DRC from external aggression by a consistently predatory approach to its own citizenry (Young and Turner 1985, pp. 248–275). Numerous attempts to reform and reconstruct the army have failed, to the point where its weakness must be understood less as a problem in need of reform and more as a structural facet of the Congolese state, meeting the interests of civilian politicians who arguably benefit more from a weak and divided armed force than a united and effective one. The post-war settlement rested on bringing in rebel forces into the FARDC, but little has been learnt from earlier failures to achieve just this: the massive investment in demobilisation and reintegration was a top-down process which rewarded and enriched FARDC commanders, some themselves former rebel officers. Ordinary soldiers from all sides however saw little benefit: wages go unpaid and rank-and-file troops continue to depend on trade, often informal and illegal but tacitly recognised by local authorities (to the extent they exist) as a reasonable alternative to direct predation on the civilian population. The failure of the FARDC and its civilian masters to offer a sustainable living to armed men, and to meet the demands of former rebel officers, is of course a key reason why it has proven so fissiparous, with specific units breaking away to form new rebel forces serving foreign interests and/or internal claimants of state power.
This does not mean that the FARDC should be regarded simply as a predatory force. Whilst there is unequal competition between soldiers and other sections of society in the eastern DRC's economy, Judith Verweijen's article shows there is also significant cooperation between military and civilian actors in their respective efforts to make economic ends meet. The striking poverty of rank-and-file soldiers, and the parlous economic conditions of even their immediate commanders, means they have little choice but to interact with the wider society of eastern DRC. Equally, for insecure Congolese communities, FARDC units and commanders provide an important, albeit evidently problematic, resource for addressing grievances and resolving disputes in the absence of legitimate state authorities. Whilst Verweijen by no means portrays a positive image of army–civil relations, her research provides an instructive contrast to the common image of the army as an external predatory force on passive civilian victims.
Such findings show that grassroots responses to the ‘chronic’ instability and violence in the region are multiple and warrant greater engagement than is allowed by a commonly accepted dichotomy between those who do (the perpetrators of violence) and those who are done to (the victims of violence). As Burt and Keiru (2011) argue, ‘[Society members] were not [just] passive victims of the war and the subsequent humanitarian crisis; they exerted agency at all levels of society’ (p. 233). Kabamba's work (2010) on the Nande traders of Butembo highlights how this primarily merchant group sustained a relatively successful transnational economic enterprise in eastern DRC, even during periods of heightened armed combat and violence. Civilians are more generally active in resisting and transforming the violent environments in which they live and work as much as they are active participants in its proliferation. Mantz (2008) similarly illustrates how artisanal miners forged elaborately devised production systems, ‘at times dangerously against the regimes of local warlords’ (our emphasis). Peripheral processes of primitive accumulation, then, are not merely destructive but also creative – producing new collective organisations, augmenting beneficial processes, resisting harmful ones, and reinventing ‘traditional’ ones (Kabamba 2010). The capacity of Congolese people to engage in what Jackson describes as ‘self-development’ applies not only through the construction of so called ‘parallel’ economic livelihoods, but also reflects a reshaping of society through the creation of parallel infrastructural and welfare support mechanisms as spaces of new politico-cultural and economic possibility.
Beyond failed states and civil(ising) society – reinventing order in the Congo?
As scholars have previously argued, the lack of government does not necessarily mean a lack of governance (Kabamba 2010) nor an absence of institutions (De Villiers 2009). In the context of the declining ‘predatory Zairian state’ and the outright disintegration of the war-torn DRC, people increasingly penetrated ‘spaces previously occupied by the imploding state and the regime’ (De Boeck 1996, p. 97). What emerged were new political complexes and social arrangements, differentiated (but not entirely separate) from the modern state. Many of the articles in this issue investigate those new structures, which are creating alternative forms of political (dis)order and economic (mis)management. This scholarship considers how a range of Congolese actors beyond the state are ‘reinventing order’ (see Trefon 2004) in the east of the country. They draw on the theme of ‘coping’ to elucidate and explain the multiple interactions and experiences of local actors within Congo's current socio-economic and political landscape. Some suffer, but many others survive, and some even thrive, whilst none of these conditions should be considered permanent.
For the ordinary citizen, perhaps the most direct and punishing aspect of state failure is the disappearance of rudimentary health-care services and schooling for children. The falling levels of public health and literacy were central elements of the national crisis from the early 1990s. Even in the late 1980s, health-care workers and school teachers were still being paid, if only irregularly and with inadequate salaries. By the mid 1990s, however, state employees rarely if ever received any salaries: nurses and teachers who remained in their posts did so in return for direct compensation from those whom they served: they received one-off payments directly from patients or parents, and held onto their positions in the hope of better days. Whilst the disastrous state of state services reflects in part the ‘débrouillez-vous’ policy advocated by Mobutu in the 1980s, it has not led to helplessness. Indeed, whilst no sensible observer would advocate self-help as the solution to the DRC's problems, there is striking evidence of how community-based organisations, particularly religious associations, have responded creatively to the crisis of state provision.
Laura Seay's article examines the health-care sector in the Kivu provinces. She develops a theory of internal organisational cohesion to examine ‘why, in a situation of state collapse, some civil society organisations are more successful at building social order than others’. Drawing on detailed case studies, Seay finds that both ethnic homogeneity and financial independence are important factors shaping the ability of such groups to survive without ties to the state. However, Seay argues, churches in the eastern DRC do not simply partner with the government, or help operate schools and hospitals. In many ways they function as the de facto state, making policy decisions, employing personnel, and managing institutions. Whilst they provide essential social services, Seay notes the danger of civil society-run systems of service provision and authority becoming entrenched, potentially making it difficult for the state to reassert its legitimate authority in the future.
Complementing Seay's work, Ashley Leinweber explores how education services continue to be provided in the context of state weakness. As education represents only 6% of government expenditure, Leinweber notes, responsibility for school provision has increasingly become dominated by Christian churches. However, she argues, unmet needs have created a unique space for Muslim organisations to establish themselves as a significant service provider. Examining the Muslim community in Maniema province, Leinweber demonstrates how a marginalised minority population has seized upon the DRC's unique post-conflict setting to mobilise for the benefit of the larger society, and as a result to move itself from the margins to the mainstream of society. However, Leinweber demonstrates that ‘faith-based organisations do not so much replace the state by providing public goods as they intersect and negotiate with the formal state’. Contrary to the ‘failed state’ approach, which suggests a total lack of institutional capacity, the state is still present, imposing a national curriculum, inspecting to ensure institutions are operating according to state regulations, and requiring that educational institutions provided by faith-based organisations are nationally accredited. Indeed, Leinweber shows that there is no enthusiasm amongst her respondents to live without the state, notwithstanding its dysfunctional and corrupt reputation: there is no evidence here that Congolese parents welcome or even accept the effective privatisation of services they believe should be provided by the state. The striking willingness of parents in eastern DRC to pay school fees (to the extent that they can) to help subsidise state education offices which, in practice, play little role in the effective provision of their children's schooling is just one sign that they, along with most other Congolese, refuse to accept the state's failure to provide services and continue to demand that state officials and politicians take responsibility for social services.
This reflects a more general popular endorsement of the continued role of the Congolese state in the face of its failures, the result of both internal and external pressures (Englebert 2009). As the editors of the 2002 ROAPE Special Issue argued:
There is a Congolese nation – plural indeed, yet with a clear sense of collective belonging and destiny. It will take a long time to heal the wounds of poverty, oppression, rebellion and war but perhaps this sentiment of ‘being Congolese’ can be transformed into the energy needed to reinvent the state and society. (Trefon et al. 2002)
Whilst that reinvention has only begun at a national level, the research in these articles indicates that small steps in that direction are being taken at a local level by sections of Congolese society. The ways in which non-state actors have sought to reproduce, rather than simply replace, state responsibilities, is equally illustrated in the research of Titeca and De Herdt (2011) and in the article by Titeca, De Herdt and Wagemakers herein. Their analysis of the confrontation between the Catholic Church and state authorities over school fees in the capital city of Kinshasa reveals the competing bases of power between these institutions and the complex social divisions that underlay provision of education services in poorer and wealthy districts of the city. Their analysis draws on notions of neo-patrimonial analyses of ‘Big Men’ to explore how church leaders are able to initiate policies which undermine those of the state and of donors. Titeca et al. also reveal, however, the limits of such patrimonial dynamics in actually implementing policies, and the considerable capacity of relatively subaltern actors – teachers who resort to strike action, and parents who refuse to pay increased fees – in shaping policy outcomes, in ways that those who fund and subsidise the Congolese state would do well to attend to.
Conclusion
More generally, the articles in this Special Issue call attention to the need for the activities and perspectives of Congolese communities and individuals to be central to any attempt to resolve the country's problems. The article by D'Errico and her co-authors intentionally places the voices of Congolese participants in the forefront of its challenge to the dominant narrative of rape and sexual violence. It challenges international donors, analysts and indeed academic and non-academic researchers to place the perspectives and intentions of Congolese communities at the centre of their analysis, something that has been sorely missing from most attempts to ‘aid’ the DRC. Understood from this perspective, attempts to reform Congolese institutions have, both historically and more recently, rested on the incorrect notion that the country's problems stem from its supposedly inherent weaknesses, rather than from its constant manipulation and exploitation by both external powers and their allies amongst Congo's elites.
As has been previously noted, non-state actors, such as communities and civic organisations, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been central to post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding. In the aftermath of conflict, with the initial paralysis of official systems and structured roles, these traditional actors become the backbone of immediate post-conflict relief and response. As Seay and Leinweber demonstrate, non-state actors also become the foundation for altered forms of governance and social welfare systems. Such fragments of order may constitute emergent building-blocks for local attempts at state-building, particularly as these systems, embedded in sets of social relations and local configurations of power, are likely to persist even as violence subsides and the state assumes a more legitimate role. Previously overlooked groups of actors, such as the Muslim community analysed by Leinweber, are actively engaging in opportunities to provide needed services. None of this should suppose a romanticised view of a unified Congolese people; indeed, Congolese society is profoundly divided along economic, social and cultural lines, in ways that will not be easily overcome – but these divisions are the result of understandable processes of historical change, political economy and the interaction between domestic and external forces, not primordial or unintelligible forces that stand outside either comprehension or control.
Such findings suggest the need then for a much bolder and ultimately more sustainable approach to peacebuilding which engages with and is informed by realities on the ground. Any attempt to put the Congolese state ‘back on its feet’ (Goodhand 2004) must address the longstanding predatory relationship of that state and its functionaries on the Congolese people (Jackson 2002). What categorises so-called failed states or situations of state failure is not the absence of the state as such – it can be very present in certain areas and aspects of daily life – but rather the blurring of boundaries between the formal and the informal, between public and private interest (Boas and Jennings 2005). It is within this space of ‘blurred sovereignty’ (see Mbembe 2002) that the intricacies of disorder and the fragments of order are negotiated and it is within these spaces that Congo's future landscape will be decided. This Special Issue is a small step toward unravelling and drawing out the multiple actors and the interactions currently taking place within that space.